72 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



from asking what it is for, what are its functions. If 

 it be a living mechanism, obviously the first question 

 that demands an answer is, how does it live ? There 

 were some men in the eighteenth century who attempted 

 to answer this question, and to them we owe the founda- 

 tion of our knowledge of the physiology of nutrition. 

 But plants manifestly not only grew but multiplied, and 

 an investigation of the organs of propagation led naturally 

 to enquiries as to how they carried out their duties, 

 to a physiology of reproduction. The acceptance of the 

 totally misleading aphorism of Linnaeus, " minerals 

 grow, plants grow and live, animals grow, live, and feel," 

 prevented men from recognising as yet a physiology of sensi- 

 tivity, while the other departments of the science to which 

 I have directed your attention were not even dreamt of. 



This seems an appropriate moment to pause and 

 take stock, so to speak, of what had been accomplished 

 during the eighteenth century. In taxonomy the most 

 noticeable feature is the gradual development of the idea 

 that a natural classification of plants was attainable if 

 only the fundamental principles could be discovered, 

 and the earlier years of the century present us with 

 several tentative efforts in this direction, notably those 

 of Morison, Ray, and Tournefort. But all these group- 

 ings, somewhat erratic perhaps, but still in the right 

 direction, were suddenly eclipsed by the so-called " sexual 

 system " of Linnaeus, which, though it may have proved 

 a temporary convenience, did much to stifle all progress 

 in real taxonomy for nearly a hundred years. It was 

 fortunate that the lamp still burned, however feebly, 

 in the hands of Antoine de Jussieu, just as the century 

 was drawing to its close. 



In morphology no great progress had been made save 

 in relation to fruits and seeds. Men still subsisted on 

 the fragments of classical lore that had filtered down 

 through the herbalists, along with the somewhat meagre 

 additions made by Jung, Ray, and Linnaeus, In anatomy 



